CBMB: Whedon Talks a Longer Age of Ultron and Mentions Planet Hulk

Joss Whedon spoke with Empire about the completion of the Avengers: Age of Ultron and gave some very interesting perspective on his film, which seems to suggest that he was less than pleased with the ultimate cut of the film that so many people are seeing now.

Whedon acknowledged that his enthusiasm for the film is true, but tempered, which appears to have been jaded by the film’s final process. Whedon’s spoke about an “unpleasant” clash with Marvel executives over including Thor’s dream sequence and the Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) farm scenes.

“There was a 195-minute cut of this movie. [In regards to the Thor/Erik subplot], the original scene was that Thor went to speak to the Norn and how it would work was that he’d go in the pool and the Norn possess him, basically, and Erik Selvig [Stellan Skarsgård] asks all the questions, and the Norn, speaking through Thor, give the answers.”

“The dreams were not an executive favorite. The dreams, the farmhouse, these were things I fought [for]. With the cave, they pointed a gun at the farm’s head and [said], ‘Give us the cave’. They got the farm. In a civilized way – I respect these guys, but that’s when it got really unpleasant. There was a point when there was going to be no cave, and Thor was going to leave and come back and say, ‘I figured some stuff out.’ And at that point I was so beaten down, I was like, ‘Sure, okay… what movie is this?’ The editors were like, ‘No no, you have to show the thing, you just can’t say it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, thank you, we can figure this out!’ You can tell it was beaten down, but it was hard won.”

The conversation also brought to light that those early post-Avengers 1 rumors about a Planet Hulk storyline may not have been completely off.

“You know, I never intended to shoot him into space. What I wanted to do was indicate that he might. I wanted the sky above him to be slightly thinner. A few stars. Because, you know, I put in, very specifically, the line, ‘Where in the world am I not a threat?’” He then continued, “I wanted to leave people with the idea that, if this is the last movie, that he may have left the world behind, because I think there is something enormously poetic about that. There is also something enormously misleading about that, because they don’t plan to make Planet Hulk, as far as I know, so they were like, ‘No, just sky, no stars,’ which was less poetic, but still very beautiful.”

So, we came very close to seeing Hulk jettisoned into space, but not because of the Illuminati, but instead on his own volition. Whedon also wanted Hulk to go gray which was somewhat evident in how in control the Hulk was as he flew off in the Quinjet. The vision of him cruising off into horizon was truly sad and would have been only even more poignant with the Lonely Man music.

Now that Whedon appears to be done with Marvel on a contractual level, he has deep-sixed his Twitter handle, and appears to also be burning bridges with Marvel. I love Whedon and I love his universes and hopefully when the director’s cut comes out of Age of Ultron, he can start to remember his time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe more fondly.